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Legal Writing: Tools and Tips for formatting

This guide describes how to complete various tasks and functions within Word that may be useful for legal writing.

The Need for Templates

Courts and firms will have rules about how they would like documents to appear.  Being able to create and then reuse templates for various types of documents will dramatically improve your speed.  If you are interested in document automation, that is, the process of being able to quickly fill in changing data in an otherwise static document, for example, changing party names in a standard contract, check out tutorials on mail merge.  If you are simply looking to apply the same look and feel to documents of the same type, check out templates.

Examples:

                               

 

Document automation tutorials:

Finding a Legal Template through Word

Open Word, click More Templates  on the right side of the screen. In the search bar, type in "legal" and click search. 

One of the templates that that may be the most useful is the Legal pleading paper. 

Note: You should be able to follow these directions and find the same templates in both Windows and Mac.